The transfer of electronic data over a network is quite ubiquitous in today's age of computer technology. This electronic data may be email, photographs, video, business presentations, or the like, all of which vary in storage space requirements and transmission times over a network. Of course, larger documents, etc. will require larger amounts of storage space and longer transmission times than a smaller document.
It is not uncommon for electronic data to be transmitted to a server for future retrieval or, in the case of email, replication and delivery to a remote device such as, for example, a portable digital assistant (PDA). These transmissions may be over a network such as, for example, the Internet, LAN, WAN, etc. all of which may be accessed through a variety of mechanisms. By way of example, the end user may have a dial-up connection, wireless devices and mechanisms, broadband connection and the like. Depending on the type of connection and a host of other factors such as location, accessibility, etc. the downloading time of the electronic data will vary.
In the situation of email, for example, it is not uncommon for users to receive hundreds of emails in a day, all of varying size and importance. Because of many factors such as the amount of email received each day, limited resources, e.g., storage space on the PDA or limited bandwidth to download many documents, etc. the user may not be able to download an important document in the time available. Take for example a marketing representative currently on travel with only a limited time, e.g., thirty minutes, before the next flight. The marketing representative receives an urgent phone message requesting review of a critical document with a very short required turn-around-time. Within this tight window of opportunity, the user must find a power source and network source to download the presentation to review. In this situation, the user only has a dial-up connection and the presentation is 10 MB. Using existing technology, the user has no way to give priority to this one particular email and ignore all other email.
Thus, using today's technology, the user has limited choices to control the transfer of data over the network, which is important to many users requiring immediate access to certain important documents, but with only a limited amount of time or resources to download these important documents. By way of example, current technology addresses the issue of limiting excessive data transfer by limited means, including:                tagging of the electronic data as high priority, a simple approach which is not discriminating as to which document should be downloaded first; and        limiting the number of new pieces of electronic data to transfer, by quantity, by data size or partial or summary type formats.        
Lotus Notes® is one type of application, which allows limited data transfer. Lotus Notes is well known for its strengths in replication, above all others in the industry. By way of illustration, Lotus Notes replication has the ability to front load the replication queue with smaller documents first so that one large document does not hold many smaller documents “hostage” until the larger one is downloaded. Notes will then prioritize those documents via a binary urgency flag, and finally it allows for summary data to be transmitted to the end user—limiting the content of the entire message.
Still other solutions use the notion of headers in email, or NNTP allows the transfer of basic information while reserving the details for a follow-on interaction. Other technologies include the notion of transcoding where an intermediary server modifies the data transferred as part of a transaction. But these techniques lack the required granularity and flexibility needed to efficiently sort and replicate the data for downloading. Thus, in current technologies, all of the data is still transferred even if only one piece of data is required or desired by the user. In fact, current replication technology is only accomplished based on limited meta data, e.g., size, time and a binary urgency flag. By way of further example:                Sub-set gross replication: This technique identifies files stored in a particular way (folder/category) and transfers all of the files (not just files which are most important); and        Transcoding proxy solutions: This technique reduces the data by altering the data.        
Accordingly, there exists a need in the art to overcome the deficiencies and limitations described hereinabove.